An Opinionated Guide to the Work and Activities Section of the AMCAS
The Work and Activities section looks like a resume, and so most applicants treat it like one. They fill in the blanks, copy bullet points from an old CV, and move on to the essays they assume actually matter. This is a mistake.
The section has 15 slots, each capped at 700 characters. That's roughly four to five sentences per activity, or about 10,500 characters of prose describing your last half-decade (give or take a few years). If you leave something out, there is no other place for the admissions committee to find it. If you pad every entry to the character limit, you waste the reader's time and signal that you can't tell what matters. The goal is not to fill the space. The goal is to make the reader feel, by the end, that they know what you've been doing and why.
Let me give you the opinions I've formed after reading hundreds of these submissions.
Remember who's on the other side of the page
Hopefully - with the advice you’re about to read - you are going to spend hours on this section. You will agonize over word choice, re-read sentences aloud, swap synonyms, and wonder whether "coordinated" sounds better than "organized." Good. That work matters.
But the person reading it is skimming. They have a stack of applications and a finite Tuesday evening. They are not weighing each word; they are scanning for the shape of a life.
Two consequences follow. The first is that a consistent template across your 15 entries helps them enormously. If every description opens the same way, and the reader quickly learns where to find the role, the responsibilities, and the takeaway, they can move through your file efficiently and actually absorb what you did. The second is that restraint on minor activities is a gift to the reader. When you keep less important descriptions short, you're telling them: spend your attention on the things I spent most of my words on. That act of prioritization is part of the signal. It shows judgment.
The format: resume plus one sentence of reflection
Most of each description should read like a resume entry. Who was the organization, what was your role, what did you actually do? A good template, for most activities, looks like this:
- One sentence describing the organization, but only if the name isn't self-explanatory. You don't need to explain what AMSA does. You probably need to explain what the Saturday Science Academy at your local community center does.
- One or two sentences describing your role and responsibilities.
- One sentence offering evidence you were good at the job, or noting something a reader wouldn't assume from the job title alone.
- One sentence, at most, on what you learned or how the experience shaped you.
That last sentence is a missed opportunity for most applicants (who wouldn’t include it in a resume, so they don’t include it here). Keep the reflection short, specific, and true. And if you didn’t learn much, well, no need to include that final sentence.
Use up to 15 slots, but don't use all 700 characters
You have 15 spots. For some of you this will feel like far too many. For others, it won't be enough. The rule is simple: include anything meaningful from roughly the last four to eight years, including high school experiences that set the tone for what came later. If it shaped you, include it. If it didn't, leave it out.
But length should match significance. That three-day volunteer event from junior year of high school that explains why you kept coming back to hospice work in college? Worth a slot. Worth maybe 200 characters. Not worth 700. Using the full character allowance on a minor experience tells the reader you can't distinguish the trivial from the formative.
Include a hobbies entry, but be strategic
I recommend one entry dedicated to hobbies. The purpose is to humanize you and, frankly, to show that you have friends. Skew toward hobbies that involve other people. An applicant whose hobbies are "reading, journaling, and long walks alone" does not sound like the collaborative happy classmate that med schools want.
The opposite failure is worse. If your hobbies entry makes it sound like you spend every weekend backcountry skiing and every weeknight in a climbing gym, the reader will wonder when you have time to serve anyone besides yourself. Mention the hobbies. Don't let them dominate.
The contact person doesn't matter, but the honesty does
For each activity, you'll list a contact. Med schools almost never reach out. The field exists mainly to enforce honesty: you're naming someone who could, in principle, confirm that you did what you said you did. So name someone real, give their actual email or phone number, and stop worrying about it.
Count your hours honestly, and count them fully
Your official hospital volunteer log says 120 hours. Fine. But be sure to include a tally of ALL of your hours: the prep work you did at home, the drive to and from the hospital, the training sessions you completed to be allowed on the floor. Don't lie, don't inflate, but also don't undersell.
The Most Meaningful essays deserve their own treatment
Three of your 15 activities get an additional 1,325 characters as "Most Meaningful." These essays are worth an entire separate post, but here is the most important thing I can tell you about them.
Personal growth is not the same as "what made me want to become a doctor." That's the personal statement's job. The Most Meaningful essays are about what you learned and how you changed through a specific experience. This distinction matters because it means you can draw from the same activity you wrote about in your personal statement, as long as the angle is different. The personal statement tells the story of your path to medicine. The Most Meaningful tells the story of how you grew along the way. Same experience, different anecdote, different point.
A structure that works for most applicants:
The first 700 characters are the standard experience description, written the same way as your other entries. Don't waste that real estate.
The next 1,325 characters can be divided into two parts: 1) putting the reader in your shoes, and 2) describing personal growth. The first part is optional - if you don’t have a specific moment to hone in on that’s worth telling (in that it has a plot and is related to your personal growth), then you don’t HAVE to include one. Perhaps instead you could write a more vivid description of the work you did throughout the activity.
Then, in the second half, tell the reader what that scene taught you, and what you carry forward from it into your future as a classmate and eventual physician. Growth isn't just what happened to you; it's what you now bring to the people you'll be learning alongside.
A closing caveat
If you ask ten admissions readers how to approach Work and Activities, you'll get ten different answers. What I've offered here is mine, formed over years of reading pre-med writing at every level of polish. I'm not claiming these are the only rules. I'm claiming they work for most pre-meds, most of whom are not great writers, but most of whom can become decent storytellers if they stop to actually consider their reader.
That's the whole game, really. Consider the reader. The admissions officer opens your file at 9pm on a Tuesday, after reading 30 others that day. What do you want them to feel (in the few samples of the writing they stop to read fully) by the time they close your application? Write toward that feeling, don’t waste their time, and most of the other decisions make themselves.